


Ties We Can't Uncut

by captainalston



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Abandonment, Flashbacks, Gen, Starfleet Academy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-09
Updated: 2014-07-09
Packaged: 2018-02-08 04:55:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1927395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainalston/pseuds/captainalston
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Hello. James Kirk, my name is Aurelan. Aurelan McClain. We've never met but I've heard so much about you." -- Jim receives a call from Sam's new fiance and he struggles with the sudden intrusion of a brother who abandoned him over a decade ago.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ties We Can't Uncut

The stranger with dark curls chatters on his screen for the third time, her words hardly reaching his ears. Proposed, she says, dropping her gaze and smiling at her hands as they constantly twist in her lap. She wraps her fingers together, squeezing her knuckles when she's uncomfortable. Twisting her ring when she loses the words to speak.

Aurelan McClain, she'd calls herself.

Jim restarts the message, watching every twitch of her mouth as she stumbles over lies. "We've never met, but I've heard so much about you." Twitch. "Well, some things about you."

She always makes eye contact when she introduces herself, then drops her gaze the more she speaks about them. About Sam. "He proposed to me a month ago," she says softly, slowly turning the silver band around her finger. She seems so fond of him when she speaks.

"Perhaps you and your mother would consider coming to the wedding when it happens," she blurts, making eye contact with the camera for the first time. Jim's gaze skitters down to the PADD in his lap, staring at the foreign faces looking back at him. "He would love it if you came, I'm sure of it." He grips the corners of the screen, his thumbs rubbing against the frame of the PADD. The silence presses against his ears like a physical force. She clears her throat and he couldn't be more thankful for the white noise of her voice. "In any case, I've attached a photo of us with this message for you to keep if you like.

"Goodbye James Kirk."

His fingers trace the foreign faces. Four of them, gazing back at him. One is clearly Aurelan, holding up a half-empty pint glass with a faint blush in her cheeks that suggests it isn't her first. To her left is a Saurian with wide eyes and ruddy red skin. One hand in her lap, one toasting the camera. The third is an Andorian, antennae sticking straight up and hair matted with alcohol and dirt.

It's the fourth person Jim avoids. The one Aurelan drapes her arm around and squeezes with a happy smile. The one who smiles back, his gaze the only one not focused on the camera. The one whose small smile disrupts the scar around his right eye, porous and red like an acid scar. The one who parts his dark brown hair to the left and whose glasses reflect the low light from the bar.

Aurelan's face remains frozen on the screen above him, mouth set in a tight smile, eyes pleading for understanding. Jim shuts the view screen off, but can't tear himself away from the PADD in his lap and the brother he's hardly seen or spoken to in ten years.

The door slides open so quickly, Jim drops his PADD. Gary Mitchell comes flying into the room, peeling his sweaty gray gym shirt off. He pauses when he sees Jim sitting on the corner of his bed with his cadet reds half on and his PADD abandoned at his feet. "What're you still doing in here? You trying to be late?"

Jim shakes his head and bends over to scoop up his PADD. "I was reading."

Gary shrugs and tosses his shirt at Jim's head. "Well hurry up or we'll both get demerits."

The shirt smells of sweat, dirt, and Gary's own blood. He wasn't particularly gifted in hand-to-hand combat no matter how many private lessons Jim gave him. The shirt ends up in a heap at the end of Gary's bed along with his shorts and socks.

Jim slides into his cadet jacket and gathers up his PADD and stylus while Gary covers himself in deodorant and dashes out the door with his jacket hanging open. They end up no more than two minutes late to lecture and quickly slink off to seats in the back.

Gary pulls out his PADD and stylus and reading glasses, beginning to take notes even as the professor is still in the midst of silencing the class. He seems afraid he'll flunk out if he doesn't maintain straight As. Jim finds himself more apathetic to his courses, particularly now when he'd rather be anywhere else than an uncomfortable metal chair in Giddion lecture hall.

Jim's fingers ghost over the edges of his PADD, and though the screen is off he can see the image of the bar as if it were seared into his memory. Sam. Samuel Kirk. All grown up and mellowed out, if the camera captured him right. The happily settled scientist, about to get married to a woman Jim had never even met. The soft, enamored smile on his face seems so foreign to Jim. So different from the young face that was always marred with anger and resentment growing up. Resenting a dead father and deadbeat uncle. A mother who was gone when they needed her most.

Sam's face seemed scrawled in fury the first time he ran away from home. The blue spots on his shirt like scars on his skin. His face so scrunched with anger Jim could hardly see the freckles across his older brother's nose.

_"I can't be a Kirk in this house."_

It felt like the first time in days Jim had heard his brother's voice without the bite and anger of their uncle's seeping in. Turning Sam as brutal and destructive as him. Instead he seemed to ache in unspoken pain. Jim wasn't sure he liked this alternative. The sorrow instead of the desperation. It didn't feel like a fair trade.

_"Show me how to that and I'll stay."_

He drove a car off a cliff. He drove a fucking car off a cliff to save his brother. To keep him nearby and to have some ally in this war against their uncle. But no matter how much Jim acted out -- no matter how many times he took Sam's side -- he lost his brother three months later.

Winona rushed back from Africa so quickly Jim thought he might just cry at the sight of her. At the loss of Sam. He didn't know -- he couldn't know. He was frustrated and confused and so, so abandoned.

Now this fiance stretched out a hand of welcoming. Did Sam even know that she had contacted him? Did he actually want to see his little brother again?

"Idiot, get up."

Jim jolts as pain blooms up from his ankle. Gary looks down on him, PADD tucked under one arm and foot raised, ready to kick again. "C'mon Rogers, class is over."

The room is quickly emptying while Jim sits, feeling weighed down by his thoughts and memories. He shakes his head at Gary and gathers his things, sliding down the stairs that circle the lecture hall. Gary's presence at his back is a comfort, but he still feels so distant and alone.

At dinner, Gary leans over his PADDs, eyes squinting despite his glasses. He rubs his temples, complaining at his blurry vision. His food goes largely forgotten save the three spoonfuls of tomato soup he had when they sat down.

Jim's food fares no better. He stares at his biscuit and single serving of macaroni and cheese, wishing he hadn't bothered to get even that much food. He's in no mood for meals and can't decide whether eating it or abandoning it is worse. He pushes the noodles around as if the mere act of touching them will make them vanish.

A tray clatters in front of him signaling Bones' arrival to the table. Gary's untouched food is a regular occurrence, but to see Jim's tray so bare and the existing food untouched is not. Bones raises an eyebrow and a concerned look across the table. "Jim, you alright? You look like you're in another world."

Jim shrugs and takes a sip of water, upset to find even the blandness of water doesn't appeal to his stomach. He sets the cup down, but Bones appears unfazed by the action, still leveling a worried look at Jim.

"I'm fine Bones," he responds, more petulantly than he intends.

"The hell you are," he says with a huff.

The two lock stares, frowning at one another. From this position, Jim can't help but look at him -- really look at him. Thick brown hair he has to style for fifteen minutes every morning just to keep it regulation. Hazel eyes that look brown when he's mad. The faintest freckles across his nose that are still trying to hold on that Georgia sun. His face is wider and tanner, but still...

Jim suddenly leans over, snatching Mitchell's glasses straight off his face. Gary yelps an, "Ow!" and his hand flies to his nose. A second later and he realizes his glasses are missing. "Kirk!" he shouts, "Stop it, those are expens -- don't do that!" But the glasses are already on Bones' face. For a second he is still, staring out two long, thin lenses. His hair parted the same way, his eyes the same glassy, hazel color.

Then he blinks and his eyes scrunch up. He squeezes them shut and yanks the glasses off his face. "Ugh, how bad is your vision, Mitchell?" he grumbles, rubbing his eyes and flinging the glasses back to Gary. The younger boy scrambles to catch them against his chest and check them for damage.

Jim leans back in his seat, the image of Bones with glasses still seared in his mind.

"What the hell was that about, Jim?" Bones mutters, his left eye cracking open as he continues to rub the other.

Jim smiles a small, secretive smile. "Nothing important," he says, leaning back over his tray and shoveling a forkful of macaroni and cheese in his mouth. "Gonna eat your shortcake?" His voice is garbled around the food and he swings his cheesy fork across the table, poised to stab the cake before getting a response.

Bones rolls his eyes and smacks the fork away, making a half-hearted attempt to cover his tray. "Get your own damn food," he mutters, but they end up sharing the cake almost 50/50. Jim leaves the strawberry for Bones and scrapes the residual whipped cream off the plate.

When they're settled back in their room, Gary immediately ducks into the bathroom to take a sonic shower. Jim strips off his cadet jacket and climbs onto the corner of his bed. He sits down cross-legged and for a moment considers falling back into the pillows and ignoring the rest of the world.

But as the sonic shower switches on and Jim hears Gary step under the pulse for a twenty minute, deep-crevice clean, he knows now is his best time.

"Computer, call Aurelan McClain."

The ringtone plays three times and three times Jim almost hangs up the call. He's about to lose his nerve when the screen clicks on and a similar head of brown curls fills up his screen. He sits straighter. Taller.

"James? James, is that you? Gosh I didn't expect you to call back so quickly." She's in a Carlton shirt that looks two sizes too big and a pair of shorts that just barely peek out beneath the hem of her shirt, but her smile is bright, lighting up her whole face.

"Yeah, well, don't put off tomorrow, right?" Jim murmurs, offering his own small smile. "Sorry about the hour. I didn't think--"

"No, no, it's quite alright!" she says quickly, sitting in front of her old screen. "I suppose..." she pauses, suddenly awkward herself, "Did you have a chance to think about what I asked? What I proposed?"

Jim stares at this woman across from him. Her hair a wavy mess of curls. Her fingers picking at a string wearing at the end of her shirt. A shirt she must have owned for several years, now. This woman his brother wants to marry.

He leans forward, a smart grin on his face. "Well I can't speak for my mother, but as far as I'm concerned, any soon to be Mrs. Kirk is welcome to call me Jim."

Her giggle is as warm and gooey as the macaroni and cheese sitting in the pit of his stomach.


End file.
